Web Hosting for Dentists

The smile gallery is the whole argument

Watch what people do on a dental website and it is fairly consistent. They look for whether you take their insurance, they look at the photographs, and they look for how quickly they can be seen. New patients in particular go straight to the gallery. It is the only page that answers the question they are actually asking, which is whether your work is any good.

So the gallery earns its place. The problem is where the pictures come from. They come out of patient records, because that is where the good ones are, and that is the point at which a marketing page becomes something else.

A recognisable photograph of a patient is a patient record

You do not need a face in the frame for a photograph to identify somebody. A distinctive smile, a chipped lateral incisor, a tattoo on a chin, a wedding ring in shot. Patients recognise themselves in these pictures, and so do the people who know them. Treating a cropped mouth as anonymous by default is where practices get into trouble.

The general expectation under US health privacy law is that publishing a patient's image for marketing needs their written authorisation, obtained specifically for that purpose, and that a general treatment consent form does not cover it. Check the exact wording with your own compliance adviser or attorney rather than with a web company. What we can tell you is the practical failure, because we see it: a gallery goes live with fifteen cases pulled off the practice camera, nobody can produce a signed release for any of them, and the fix is taking the page down.

Keep the signed authorisations somewhere you can find them by case, not somewhere you can find them by date. The day somebody asks which release covers the third photograph in the row is the day the filing system either works or does not.

New patient paperwork, and what web hosting for dentists cannot do

Every practice wants the new patient to arrive with the paperwork done. There are two ways to do that and they are not equally simple.

A printable PDF that the patient fills in and brings with them is the boring option, and for a lot of practices it is the correct one. The form never touches your website, no health information is transmitted anywhere, and hosting the file is the same as hosting any other file. It costs you nothing and it exposes you to nothing.

An online form that collects medical history, medications and insurance details is a different animal. The moment a patient types a condition into a box on your site, you are handling health information in transit and at rest, and everyone in that chain including whoever runs the form needs to be part of your compliance arrangement. That is a conversation with your compliance adviser about business associate agreements, not a checkbox on a hosting plan.

• A standard shared hosting plan is not a HIPAA compliance solution and nobody should sell it to you as one.
• The forms that come bundled with website software generally email you the submission in plain text. That is the part people miss.
• If you want true online intake, the usual answer is a dedicated dental intake product that signs an agreement with you, linked from your site rather than built into it.
• Your SSL certificate protects data crossing the wire. It says nothing about where the data lands or who can read it afterwards.

Regulatory points here are described in general terms only. Confirm what applies to your practice with your own adviser, because the answer depends on facts about your practice that a hosting page cannot know.

Emergency searches, and why the site has to be quick

Someone with a broken tooth at nine in the morning is not reading your practice philosophy. They are searching on a phone, often on a patchy connection, and they will call whichever practice answers the question first. This is the one genuinely time-sensitive audience a dental site has.

What they need is a phone number that dials when tapped, whether you see emergencies the same day, and roughly where you are. If those three things are below the fold or hidden behind a menu, the visit is lost to whoever put them at the top.

Speed matters here for the same reason. A homepage carrying a slideshow of stock photographs, an embedded video and half a dozen review widgets takes long enough to load that a person in pain gives up. That is almost never a hosting problem. It is a weight problem, and the fix is removing things rather than buying a larger plan.

• Resize photographs before uploading them. Clinical cameras produce enormous files.
• Make the phone number a real tel link so a tap dials it.
• State your emergency policy in plain words, including if the answer is that you refer out after hours.
• Keep your hours right in both places, on the site and on your Google Business Profile, because most people see the profile first.

How AldoMedia helps

AldoMedia has built and maintained websites for Western New York businesses since 1999. We are an independent authorised reseller rather than the operator of the underlying platform, and we will tell you when the plan you already have is the right one.

We are not your compliance adviser and will not pretend to be. What we will do is build the gallery so you can remove an image yourself in two minutes, keep the intake form off the site where that is the safer answer, and make sure the emergency caller finds your phone number first. If you are inheriting a site somebody else built, start with taking over a website. Call 716-771-2536 or tell us what your practice site runs on.